Forever is Composed of Nows
August 23, 2008 1:08 am Games for Fun, Gaming
Braid is one of those games that love it or hate it, it gets people talking. People have told me everything from “Braid is pretentious bullshit” to “You owe it to yourself to play this game.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Braid, it’s a 2-d puzzle platformer available on XboxLive Arcade. The art direction is done in the painterly style, which give Braid a really unique look. The major game mechanics involve time manipulation, which I saw from a lot of indie games (for example, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom) at GDC this year. The music is interesting too, as it features classical and folk music, which isn’t normally found outside of a pub in a Never Winter Nights game.
I just finished Braid (I was home form work, sick and bored and figured why the hell not?) and for an arcade title it’s exceptional. While the price tag of 1200 points ($15 US dollars) might put people off, the game has enough uniqueness, fun, and polish to justify the price point.
The object of the game is fairly simple. Your character, Tim, must travel from world to world collecting puzzle pieces. Each world is divded into smaller levels where you must use various time shifting mechanics (pressing X rewinds time, in later levels, pressing Y drops a time warp bubble) to solve some puzzle and collect a puzzle piece. I think the puzzle design was some of the best I’ve played, right up there with Portal. I’m not a great puzzle designer myself, so maybe I’m just easily impressed. Generally the simpler puzzles teach you the new mechanic for each world and lead into the more challening puzzles later on. For example, at the start of world 3, you learn that objects that are green and sparkling are not affected by time. You learn this by jumping into a pit with a green key at the bottom. Normally, rewinding time would put the key back in the pit and Tim back at the top, but instead the key travels with Tim back to the top. Then you’re free to jump across the pit with the key and continue.
Most of the puzzles are fairly rewarding, and the mechanics change just enough on each world to make you want to keep playing. The boss fights were also a nice change of pace that worked really well with the time shifting mechanics. Really, my only gripes were that some of the puzzles were too hard for me (I had to look up how to do a few of them, like the one where you have to bounce a Braid off Tim’s head) and that the narrative didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t really get the books or the story, and I’m still not quite sure what the ending means.
In any event, this is a well designed puzzle game with really beautifully done art and sound. It’ll be interesting to see what these guys do next. I’m sure they could make a sequel and people would eat it up. However, their whole “non-filler” minimalist attitude leads me to believe there won’t be a sequel. Sequel or not, I’ll probably check out the next game they make.